Pop and satire – Christiane Rösinger: The non -cleaner

The “Göttingen Elch” is the highest German satirical award, but also the only one. The singer and author Christiane Rösinger will be awarded him on Sunday. Not as the first woman, but she has only been the fourth since 1997. After the draftsmen Marie Marcks, Franziska Becker and the cabaret artist Maren Kroymann. The rest were men, 26 in total. These include names such as Robert Gernhardt, Otto Waalkes, Max Goldt, Wiglaf Droste and Greser & Lenz. As a pop musician, Röninger does not fits in this scene from the »Titanic« environment that is likely to be delightful. Even if many cabaret artists and comedians try to sing in a pop -like manner and many pop musicians try out literature, these spheres are still separated in the media. Maybe it will finally be different now?

She recorded plates, worked journalistically, studied dramaturgy, wrote books and made theater. In the “taz” she currently writes a column every two weeks in which she tells “from the life of a boomer”. Rösinger is born in 1961 and has seen a lot of shine and misery in the subculture since she moved from a Baden village to Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1985, where she still lives for rent despite all the gentrification. In order to be able to afford this, she taught German for refugees, among other things: “We will later make your book about this work.

That used to be the motto of the people who moved to Berlin because they wanted to experience more. Living was very cheap, but since the mid -nine years it has become constant more expensive to impossible. Unless you get an apartment from the parents and quit the people who have lived in it so far. Very nice, but still brutal when the new apartment owners faithfully insure the terminated: “Capitalism is to blame for everything / we are actually precarious at the end of our patience / we actually live if that was not with the apartment,” as Rösinger in her song “Condominium” has sung. It’s funny, but also bad when you think about it. Rösinger can get the private policy madness very well.

At first she didn’t really fit into the pop music. The music of her first band Lassie Singers was rejected by the Indielabels as “hit shit” at the end of the 1980s, so they went to the record industry in order to be able to make indiemusics. They were the female outsiders under loud men’s bands, about which almost only men wrote. They never got a front page in the music press. They were considered a school of Hamburg, but lived in Berlin. The Lassies were cheerful and touching, the men mostly humor and arrogant. “The band was always too intellectual for Funpop and always too humorous for Discourse à la Blumbeld or Bernd Begemann,” says the “Munzinger Archive” in retrospect.

“Something is always” sang Rösinger with her second volume Britta in the late 1990s and announced the “new bitterness” against the superficial party hedonism, which she emphasized again in 2017 as her personal program: “And because I am melancholic, I take it all difficult. / And because I’m musical, that gives a few songs. « It comes from the discomfort, but also the wise wit of her art, it is a kind of funny seriousness. It is often “evergreens for misery of heterosexuality”, as she once called her music. “I think I have a soft spot for idiots” she sang, but also “love is often overrated” and “pissed off couples, nobody misses”. Such texts became winged words like those from the songs by Rio Reiser.

With Almut Klotz, who died in 2013, also a Baden exile, she founded the Lassie Singers. After the band was dissolved in 1998, the two “Flittchen Records” ran out of baptism, the first feminist label in general, to which an additional bar was connected: Every Wednesday they invited to “flittal” in the “Maria am Ostbahnhof”. The Lassis had already sung from the “life in the bar”, to this day this is the main field of research by Rösinger, because you can experience and feel a lot. Because she has been there for so long and has always been on the move without a sale and opportunism – she recently described her relationship with the Greens as “disturbed” – she has now been proclaimed the “Grande Dame of the Berlin underground”. She banned this name in 2017 in the “Kaput” magazine-“until I am 70”.

The “flittal” was grated away, but reborn for a few years in 2010, in the southern block at the Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. Then the “indie elite” of Berlin met, as the “Tagesspiegel” claimed. Christiane Rösinger would never express himself so clumsy. On the contrary: “Insensle”, she asked her column as a good resolution for the new year – from the people who sit at home and complain that they would not really fit in anywhere because they were already so old. Rösinger asked: “What is this vanity, dear readers?”